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Last year, hybrid cloud was a priority for many enterprises, although with a certain amount of confusion about what it involved. This year, those ambitious plans are showing up as an approach to hybrid cloud that relies on platform as a service (PaaS) to take full advantage of cloud models.

The enterprise view of hybrid cloud is becoming clearer and more sophisticated than simply using cloud alongside existing on-premises IT, says Adam Warby CEO of managed services provider Avanade (a Microsoft/Accenture joint venture). “The way I’ve seen it evolve is that people have been getting more focused on hybrid IT than on hybrid cloud, and that’s relevant because most people are having to deal with managing legacy and existing applications while trying to reinvent what they're doing as a business …. What we're seeing now are different workloads that really do need the ability to work seamlessly between on-premises and in-public cloud.”

As an example, Warby points to the way you can run SAP workloads, including Business Suite and SAP HANA, on Azure and integrate services like Fieldglass, SuccessFactors and Concur with Office 365. SAP was a key workload for Avanade client Rio Tinto, “who are moving their entire IT as a service into the cloud,” Warby says. “It’s important we have that kind of flexibility. I think pubic cloud will be the dominant workload over time, but the ability to do close to the processor, high volume transactions close to the data is still going to be important.”